The visible foregrounds of history, therefore, have the same significance as the outward phenomena of the individual man (his statue, his bearing, his air, his stride, his way of speaking and writing), as distinct from what he says or writes. In the “knowledge of men” these things exist and matter. The body and all its elaborations—defined, “become” and mortal as they are—are an expression of the soul. But henceforth “knowledge of men” implies also knowledge of those superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of their mien, their speech, their acts—these terms being meant as we mean them already in the case of the individual.
Descriptive, creative, Physiognomic is the art of portraiture transferred to the spiritual domain. Don Quixote, Werther, Julian Sorel, are portraits of an epoch, Faust the portrait of a whole Culture. For the nature-researcher, the morphologist as systematist, the portrayal of the world is only a business of imitation, and corresponds to the “fidelity to nature” and the “likeness” of the craftsman-painter, who, at bottom, works on purely mathematical lines. But a real portrait in the Rembrandt sense of the word is physiognomic, that is, history captured in a moment. The set of his self-portraits is nothing else but a (truly Goethian) autobiography. So should the biographies of the great Cultures be handled. The “fidelity” part, the work of the professional historian on facts and figures, is only a means, not an end. The countenance of history is made up of all those things which hitherto we have only managed to evaluate according to personal standards, i.e., as beneficial or harmful, good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory—political forms and economic forms, battles and arts, science and gods, mathematics and morals. Everything whatsoever that has become is a symbol, and the expression of a soul. Only to one having the knowledge of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of a law it abhors. What it demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus research reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.[[82]]
The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows history is born. He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow, guided by a feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected by persuasion, but which only too rarely manifests itself in full intensity. Direction, fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are things that one can do if one likes. These things are work, but the other is creation. Form and law, portrayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different organs, and their opposition is that in which life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they “cognize.” That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity. Poetry and historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are kin. But, as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art-works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out. The artist or the real historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie etwas wird), and he can re-enact its becoming from its lineaments, whereas the systematist, whether he be physicist, logician, evolutionist or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that has become. The artist’s soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something potential that may actualize itself, something complete and perfect—in the language of an older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic spirit, narrow and withdrawn “abs-tract”) from the sensual, is an autumnal and passing phenomenon belonging to the ripest conditions of a Culture. Linked with the city, into which its life is more and more herded, it comes and goes with the city. In the Classical world, there is science only from the 6th-century Ionians to the Roman period, but there was art in the Classical world for just as long as there was existence.
Once more, a paradigm may help in elucidation.
| Soul | World | ||||||||
| Existence |  | potentiality | → | fulfilment (Life) | → | actuality | |||
 | becoming | → | the become | ||||||
| Consciousness | direction | extension | |||||||
| organic | mechanical | ||||||||
| symbol, portrait, | number, notion. | ||||||||
| ↓ |  | ↓ | |||||||
 | History | Nature | |||||||
| World-image | Rhythm, form. | Tension, law. | |||||||
| Physiognomic. | Systematic. | ||||||||
| Facts | Truths | ||||||||
Seeking thus to obtain a clear idea of the unifying principle out of which each of these two worlds is conceived, we find that mathematically-controlled cognition relates always (and the purer it is, the more directly) to a continuous present. The picture of nature dealt with by the physicist is that which is deployed before his senses at the given moment. It is one of the tacit, but none the less firm, presuppositions of nature-research that “Nature” (die Natur) is the same for every consciousness and for all times. An experiment is decisive for good and all; time being, not precisely denied, but eliminated from the field of investigation. Real history rests on an equally certain sense of the contrary; what it presupposes as its origin is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty within, which is continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is incapable therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time.[[83]] (We shall consider later what the physicist means by “time.”) The picture of history—be it the history of mankind, of the world of organisms, of the earth or of the stellar systems—is a memory-picture. “Memory,” in this connexion, is conceived as a higher state (certainly not proper to every consciousness and vouchsafed to many in only a low degree), a perfectly definite kind of imagining power, which enables experience to traverse each particular moment sub specie æternitatis as one point in an integral made up of all the past and all the future, and it forms the necessary basis of all looking-backward, all self-knowledge and all self-confession. In this sense, Classical man has no memory and therefore no history, either in or around himself. “No man can judge history but one who has himself experienced history,” says Goethe. In the Classical world-consciousness all Past was absorbed in the instant Present. Compare the entirely historical heads of the Nürnberg Cathedral sculptures, of Dürer, of Rembrandt, with those of Hellenistic sculpture, for instance the famous Sophocles statue. The former tell the whole history of a soul, whereas the latter rigidly confines itself to expressing the traits of a momentary being, and tells nothing of how this being is the issue of a course of life—if indeed we can speak of “course of life” at all in connexion with a purely Classical man, who is always complete and never becoming.
VI
And now it is possible to discover the ultimate elements of the historical form-world.
Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again, a thousand-hued glittering tumult, it seems, of perfectly wilful chance—such is the picture of world-history when first it deploys before our inner eye. But through this seeming anarchy, the keener glance can detect those pure forms which underlie all human becoming, penetrate their cloud-mantle, and bring them unwillingly to unveil.
But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand planes that the Faust-eye[[84]] sees piled one beyond another—the becoming of the heavens, of the earth’s crust, of life, of man—we shall deal here only with that very small morphological unit that we are accustomed to call “world-history,” that history which Goethe ended by despising, the history of higher mankind during 6000 years or so, without going into the deep problem of the inward homogeneity of all these aspects. What gives this fleeting form-world meaning and substance, and what has hitherto lain buried deep under a mass of tangible “facts” and “dates” that has hardly yet been bored through, is the phenomenon of the Great Cultures. Only after these prime forms shall have been seen and felt and worked out in respect of their physiognomic meaning will it be possible to say that the essence and inner form of human History as opposed to the essence of Nature are understood—or rather, that we understand them. Only after this inlook and this outlook will a serious philosophy of history become feasible. Only then will it be possible to see each fact in the historical picture—each idea, art, war, personality, epoch—according to its symbolic content, and to regard history not as a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or inner necessity, but as an organism of rigorous structure and significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental present of the observer.